Stanislav Kurilov

As a young child, he learned to swim in secret from his own parents (who forbade him to enter open water), and at the age of 10, on a dare, he swam across the Irtysh.

Even though the Soviet Union operated a large number of research vessels on a worldwide scale, the authorities decided that Kurilov was not eligible for any overseas expeditions, either because of him learning about chemical warfare during his military service,[6] because his father had been a prisoner of war during World War II,[5] or because of Kurilov's "foreign connection": his sister had married an Indian citizen and immigrated to India, and later to Canada.

[4] Kurilov came to resent the Soviet state even more when, starting in 1970, two of his team's joint underwater projects with Jacques-Yves Cousteau fell through one after the other, because he was refused a passport.

It was a popular "cruise to nowhere", where a ship would depart Vladivostok in the Far East, sail south toward the equator through the Pacific Ocean, and come back without entering any foreign ports.

It was known that the ship would pass within view of several foreign countries, and after studying its planned route, Kurilov decided that the best chance for an escape would be in the Philippine Sea, off the coast of Siargao Island.

[7] After about six months of investigation, first in Cagayan de Oro,[7] later in Manila (the Philippine authorities may have suspected him to be a Soviet spy), Kurilov was able to leave for Canada.

An unnamed member of the biology faculty at Moscow University, who was 26 at the time, escaped from another Soviet cruise liner (MV Rus) off the Philippines, in a rubber raft.